ABSTRACT

Of the many ironies that characterized the recent presidential campaign—Gore, the master debater, losing the debates; Bush, the dissolute frat boy, winning the character issue; Clinton, the impeached liar, looking increasingly presidential in comparison to his would-be successors, all topped off by the winner of the popular vote declared the loser of the election—none was as poignant as the spectacle of the first Jewish candidate for high office, Joseph Lieberman, extolling the virtues of religious morality against the backdrop of the escalating violence in the Middle East. For despite all of the high-minded claims he made on behalf of religion’s civilizing function, the evidence in front of our eyes is of how poisonous religious conflicts can be in undercutting what most civilizations call moral norms. However one judges the arguments on both sides of the Middle East conflict, an incontrovertible fact at its heart is the willingness, even eagerness, of each party to resort to violent means to reach ends that are often explicitly religious in nature. Whether one sees Ariel Sharon’s ill-fated visit to the Temple Mount as a cynical provocation or as the assertion of a justifiable right, the fact that it could produce such a horrific outcome speaks volumes about the thinness of the veneer of mutual tolerance that keeps these different religions from each other’s throats.